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Drought Projects

The activities of the Drought Team responsible for the European and Global Drought Observatories are part of the series of activities in the JRC on which you can find more on these pages: Enhanced Situational Awareness for Crisis Management
Risks and Opportunities for the Future

The Drought Observatories are financed by the Copernicus project under the Emergency topic.
Additional projects focussing on capacity building, enhancing our information platform and collaboration with counterparts around the world are presented on this page.

Ongoing Projects

Intra-ACP Climate Services

This project is financed by DG INTPA and focusses on capacity building. The project is executed by 6 teams in the JRC partnering with colleagues in their domain. The Drought team provides in this project technical support to regional meteorological services in the ACP (Africa, Caribbean, Pacific) Countries. Guideline for the project was the successful development together with CIIFEN in Ecuador of a Open-Source Drought Observatory called SCADO (South, Central American Drought Observatory) that resulted from the EuroCLIMA project. We partner with ICPAC (IGAD Climate Prediction and Application Centre) in Kenya to implement a open source based web-map server connected to a large spatial database, while creating the system specifications together. The new system is called DroughtWatch. The result of this collaboration allows to improve the robustness of the Global Drought Observatory (GDO) providing higher resolution information and knowledge and with the development of new indices specified by African scientists. Recently also the African Center of Meteorological Applications for Development (ACMAD) joined this initiative. A cloudtechnology based platform African Drought Advisory is under development and expected to be in production by the end of 2023.
East African Drought Watch

IDMP CEE

The Global Water Partnership (GWP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) launched a joint Integrated Drought Management Programme (IDMP) in 2013 to improve monitoring and prevention of drought in various parts of the world – among them also in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), which is seriously vulnerable to drought. The vulnerability to this natural hazard alerted the public, governments and operational agencies in the CEE to many socio-economic problems accompanying water shortage. Whether due to natural climate variability or climate change, there is an urgent need to develop better drought monitoring and management systems, as well as a broader proactive social response to manage drought risks. The scope of IDMP is “to support stakeholders at all levels by providing them with policy and management guidance through the globally coordinated generation of scientific information and sharing best practices and knowledge for integrated drought management”. At the planning and implementation level, the primary beneficiaries of the program are government institutions and agencies responsible for developing drought management policies and/or implementing systems for drought monitoring and prediction and drought risk mitigation and response at multiple time scales and regional, national and local spatial scales. The secondary beneficiaries are decision-makers and managers whose task is to implement these policies, including drought mitigation and adaptation. These beneficiaries also include non-governmental institutions involved in regional and national drought advocacy, awareness and response efforts.
IDMP CEE also promotes EDO as European drought data exchange platform. More on IDMP CEE can be found at IDMPCEE.

EDORA

The European Drought Observatory for Resilience and Adaptation (EDORA) is an initiative of the European Parliament financing research on the impacts of Drought in Europe. The EDORA project, managed by the Directorate of the Environment of the European Commission, aims at strengthening the European Drought Observatory (EDO), hosted by the Joint Research Centre (JRC), by enhancing drought risk assessment at different scales, aggregating data on impacts in different sectors, and fostering connections and establishment of drought observatories in the Member States. These actions will ultimately enhance the resilience and adaptation to drought across the EU, by offering a common core of operational data and knowledge about droughts.
The project page of EDORA can be visited here EDORA

Finalized Projects

DEWFORA

Dewfora Logo, Africa

DEWFORA was the "Improved Drought Early Warning and FORecasting to strengthen preparedness and adaptation to droughts in Africa" project. DEWFORA is a FP7 Small or Medium Scale Focused Research Project where 19 different partners from Africa and Europe were participating. The principal aim of DEWFORA was to develop a framework for the provision of early warning and response through drought impact mitigation for Africa. This framework covered the whole chain from monitoring and vulnerability assessment, to forecasting, warning, response, and knowledge dissemination. DEWFORA addressed existing capabilities for drought monitoring in Africa and develop improved drought indicators that consider the wider domain of water use and water users, and their dependence on variable water resources. Through these improved indicators vulnerability to drought at different scales across Africa will be assessed. These indicators will be applied to map drought vulnerability in the current climate, but also the change in drought hazard and vulnerability in the future, changed, climate. Through this understanding, drought preparedness and adaptation strategies appropriate to the African context will be developed. Warning thresholds that can be reliably forecasted, and advanced meteorological, hydrological and agricultural forecasting methods to predict these thresholds will be developed. Four regional case studies; the Eastern-Nile basin, the Limpopo Basin, the Niger basin, and the Oum-er-Rbia basin, as well as one continental scale African case study will facilitate knowledge development, and through detailed comparison of drought forecasting, mitigation and adaptation practices in Europe and Africa the proposal will help advance these in Africa as well as in Europe. DEWFORA will focus on effective dissemination and knowledge transfer through interaction with stakeholders and capacity building programmes in Africa. More information on DEWFORA can be found here.


CARPATCLIM

Carpat Clim project

The main aim of the CARPATCLIM project was to improve the basis of climate data in the Carpathian Region for applied regional climatological studies such as a Climate Atlas and drought monitoring. The service investigated the temporal and spatial structure of the climate in the Carpathian Mountains and the Carpathian basin with unified or directly comparable methods. Before, there is no valid description of the climate of the Carpathian Region. The main objectives of the project were:
- Improve the availability and accessibility of a homogeneous and spatially representative time series of climatological data for the Carpathian Region through data rescue, quality control, and data homogenisation;
- Ensure Carpathian countries data harmonisation with special emphasis on across country harmonisation and production of gridded climatologies per country;
- Develop a Climate Atlas as a basis for climate assessment and further applied climatological studies as well as for drought monitoring in the Carpathian Region in the frame of the European Drought Observatory.

EuroGEOSS

EuroGEOSS

The EuroGEOSS project aimed to enhance collaboration and data exchange in the thematic areas of drought, forestry and biodiversity. The infrastructures developed in the project were based on GEOSS and INSPIRE regulations for interoperability (GEOSS is the Global Earth Observation System of Systems and INSPIRE is the directive on an Infrastructure of Spatial Data of the European Commission). The objective was to enhance the reuse of existing data collections and applications and derive new insights through the analysis of the data made available.

The drought group of the EuroGEOSS project worked on the integration of drought-related data from continental, national, regional and local organisations. The goal was improving the decision making capabilities of the European Drought Observatory by complementing continental overview data with data from more detailed scales. The EuroGEOSS infrastructure guided its users through the following steps: data discovery, data visualization, data analysis, data download. This website provides relevant tools and links in the "Data & Tools" section.

More information on the EuroGEOSS project can be found here.
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